Time-cost trade-off analysis in project management: An ant system approach (original) (raw)

Time-cost trade-off problem (TCTP) is an important issue of industrial projects scheduling in planning phase. This paper introduces and develops a new multi-mode approach for the discrete time-cost trade-off problem (DTCTP) in PERT networks of project management, where activities are subjected to multi-mode discrete cost functions with normal distribution of activity durations. The main objective of proposed model is to optimally maximize the project completion probability in a predefined deadline using four potential extreme strategies. The first application of ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm for the stochastic DTCTP has been introduced to solve the proposed DTCTP as a non-linear zero-one mathematical problem. In order to show the process of proposed approach, an illustrative example is discussed and an overall efficiency measure is developed to determine the appropriate levels of ACO parameters that lead to the accurate results such that the computational time is minimized. The results obtained from the comparative-computational study show that the proposed algorithm is an effective approach for the presented stochastic DTCTP.